The Hidden

by Sally Spencer

  Specifically, it’s because we’re starting on the assumption that there’s something weird about the Green family, and are working our way outwards, Crane thought. And part of that process is to talk to the two lads who supposedly were playing board games with John Green and Roger Smith at the time Mary Green was being murdered.

  ‘I’m afraid that given the nature of my investigation, I can’t be specific at all,’ Crane said.

  ‘Then I’m not sure that without their parents being present …’

  ‘The school is in loco parentis, so all that the law requires is that a member of your staff be present during the questioning,’ Crane said.

  ‘Is that right?’ the headmaster asked, dubiously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Crane said. ‘It’s clearly stated in paragraph fifty-three, sub-section c, of the Criminal Law Code.’

  Jesus, he thought, I’m getting as good at making things up as Kate Meadows is!

  Or should that be as bad as Kate Meadows?

  ‘Well, I suppose that would be all right,’ the headmaster conceded. ‘The person you should talk to now is my secretary, Elizabeth. She can tell you where the boys are, and arrange for a member of my pastoral care team to be there when you talk to them.’

  It turned out that while the headmaster called the school secretary Elizabeth, everyone else knew her as Liz, and she had worked not only for this headmaster but also for the previous two ones.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve seen them come and go,’ she said. ‘They sweep in here thinking they’re going to revolutionize the whole of the educational process, and in the end, all they come up with is a new way of collecting the dinner money.’

  Crane grinned. ‘I need to see these two lads,’ he said, holding out a piece of paper with the boys’ names on it.

  ‘Well, our first step is to make sure that they’re actually in school today,’ Liz said.

  She reached under her desk and came up with a long thin red attendance register, the sight of which was enough to take Crane immediately back to his own childhood.

  Liz opened the register, and ran an expert eye down the columns of diagonal strokes.

  ‘You’re out of luck with Michael Gray,’ she said. ‘He’s not in school today. Oh, and there’s a surprise, Philip Jones isn’t, either. How strange it is that they’re both off on the same day.’

  ‘Maybe I’m just unlucky,’ Crane said.

  ‘It’s especially strange since they’ve each got a perfect attendance record for the term,’ Liz said, having scanned the rest of that page of the register.

  Crane felt a sudden emptiness inside him.

  ‘Do they have any brothers or sisters in the school?’ he asked.

  ‘Let me see,’ Liz said, reaching into a filing cabinet and pulling out a couple of khaki-coloured envelopes. ‘Yes, Michael has two sisters and Philip has a brother and sister.’

  ‘Could you check if they’re here today?’ Crane asked.

  More bright red registers appeared, more columns were quickly scanned by the secretary’s eyes.

  ‘No, funnily enough, they’re all absent,’ Liz said. ‘They’ve probably all gone down with the same bug. We get a lot of that.’

  But it wasn’t illness that was keeping them away from school, Crane thought – he was sure it wasn’t that.

  The blonde nurse helped the porter to decant the old woman from the trolley to the bed, then turned to the doctor and said, ‘What are her chances?’

  ‘Rather good,’ said the doctor, who was there less to impart information than to seize his opportunity to flirt with the nurse. ‘When she wakes up, she’ll feel rather sore inside, but then a stomach pump will do that to you, and on the whole, I’d say she’s got off rather lightly.’

  The nurse picked up the board which had been clipped onto the edge of the bed.

  ‘Religion unknown,’ she read. ‘I thought all old women were confirmed churchgoers – if not for the company and warmth, then at least for the heavenly insurance.’

  ‘You’re a very cynical young woman,’ the doctor said, ‘which makes you just the sort of person we very much need in the modern nursing profession. And maybe you’re right about most of them, but according to her home help – who we call Hallelujah Winifred, because if you get too close to her when she’s singing one of her hymns, she can burst your ear drum – Mrs Brown has never shown the least tendency towards, or interest in, religion.’

  ‘She has no friends or relatives, either,’ the nurse said, consulting the board again.

  ‘Again, that can happen to anyone if they just happen to live long enough,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Do you know, it almost seems as if she wasn’t a real person at all,’ the nurse said.

  If she hadn’t been such an attractive blonde, the doctor would have told her not to be so fanciful.

  But she was an attractive blonde – one, moreover, who he had hopes of eventually mounting, and so he said indulgently, ‘And what, pray, leads you to that conclusion?’

  The nurse shrugged. ‘No religion, no family and perhaps the most boring surname in the English language,’ she said. ‘It’s like someone with a very limited imagination had made her up.’

  ‘So she has a common name,’ the doctor said. ‘Lots of people do. That’s what makes it common.’

  Frank Brough wasn’t happy about having a detective visit his motorcycle shop, especially when the detective in question was the dogged DS Higgins.

  ‘It’s such a long time since our paths have crossed, Frank,’ Higgins said jovially, looking around the shop. ‘I think I was still on the beat the last time we had a run-in.’

  ‘Well, you see, there’s no reason for our paths to cross, Mr Higgins, because you’re a policeman and I’m an honest businessman.’

  ‘Is that what you are?’ Higgins asked sceptically.

  ‘It is – and if you look around the shop, you’ll see that I’m doing all right for myself.’

  ‘So no more chopping up bikes for spare parts for you, then, Frank?’ Higgins asked.

  ‘I never—’

  ‘No more stuffing nicked bikes into packing cases and shipping them across the water to the Republic of Ireland.’

  ‘Now you were never able to prove I was involved in any of that, Mr Higgins,’ Brough said.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ Higgins agreed. ‘But we both know it went on, don’t we?’ He grinned. ‘Still, that’s all water under the bridge now, and what concerns me today is Jim Coles.’

  ‘Jim Coles? Jim Coles,’ Brough repeated, as if the name was totally unfamiliar to him.

  ‘Jim was a young motorcyclist who learned at great personal cost that you can’t argue with a lorry,’ Higgins said.

  ‘That’s right. Jim Coles! I know who he was now. He rode a Honda 250, didn’t he?’

  ‘And after the crash, the bike was delivered to your shop, wasn’t it? Now why was that?’

  ‘I do the assessments for the insurers. You see, it’s not worth them sending one of their head office fellers down here, so I act as their agent.’

  ‘It’s a very responsible job,’ Higgins said. ‘They must trust you.’

  ‘Like I said, I’m a respectable businessman.’

  ‘So what did you say about the bike in your report to the insurance company, Frank?’

  ‘I said the bike was a complete write-off – which it was.’

  ‘And what happened to it after that?’

  ‘I sent it down to the scrap yard for crushing.’

  ‘Well, there you are, all my questions are answered,’ Higgins said. ‘Thank you for your time, sir.’ He walked towards the door, then stopped and turned around. ‘No, I was wrong – there is one more question I still need to ask. What happened to the plates?’

  ‘The plates?’

  ‘The licence plates, which, strictly speaking, are government property and should be returned to the appropriate authority once they cease to be used on a vehicle.’

  ‘The plates were as much a write-off as the rest of
the bike,’ Brough said. ‘You won’t believe this – I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes – but they’d sort of melded into the general bodywork.’

  ‘You’re right there, Frank – I don’t believe it,’ Higgins said. ‘But maybe I will when you’ve shown me the photographs.’

  ‘What photographs?’

  Higgins laughed. ‘The insurance company may not have felt it was worth sending one of its people here, but they’ll have wanted more proof than just your say-so. What they’ll have wanted, I should imagine, is photographs of the bike from every angle. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Brough agreed, sounding more and more concerned with every second that passed, ‘but I don’t have them anymore.’

  ‘No problem,’ Higgins said cheerfully. ‘I expect the insurance company will have them on file.’

  Brough licked his lips, which suddenly felt incredibly dry.

  ‘Mr Higgins …’ he began.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ Higgins said. ‘We both know you took the plates off that bike and sold them on, but if I take you in, you’ll come up with some cock and bull story about how the shop was burgled one night and the plates were stolen, but it didn’t seem worth reporting because …’

  ‘Mr Higgins …’ Brough said again.

  ‘I haven’t finished, sunshine,’ Higgins said harshly, ‘and if you’ve got any sense, you’ll shut up, because what I’m about to tell you is to your advantage. I could do all that, but it would take time, and while I might eventually be able to charge you as an accessory before the fact in a murder—’

  ‘What!’

  ‘… an accessory before the fact in a murder, I’ve got bigger fish to fry than you. So all I want from you, my son, is the name of the man you sold the plates to, and then I’ll be on my way. Do you get what I’m saying?’

  ‘I get it,’ Brough said miserably.

  Monika Paniatowski is back in the woods, and this time it is so real that she can smell the fresh leaves and feel the spongy soil beneath her feet.

  And there is much less confusion, too, this time.

  She knows she’s not in the woods to see her father, because he is a long time dead.

  She knows she’s not in the woods as part of an investigation into the murder of a journalist, because that case has been closed for two years, and the poor soul responsible for the murder is behind bars.

  And she knows she is not about to be raped, because that rape is in the past, too, and only the consequences are there to greet her every morning with their smiles and complaints.

  But this visit does have something to do with the rape, because she is doing what she now tells herself she should have done a long time ago – returning to the scene of her nightmare, in an attempt to bury her fears.

  It is not easy, but she never thought it would be.

  Every step she takes, it gets harder, and there is at least a part of her which feels that she has already been brave enough, and now is the time for a tactical retreat, followed by a large, neat vodka.

  But she will not back down. She will carry on until she reaches the very spot at which she was violated, and she will stand there, looking down at it, and telling herself that it is all over – that it has nothing to do with the life she is living now, and can have nothing to do with that life.

  It is because she is so wrapped up in facing the past that the actual person she passes – going in the opposite direction, and carrying a picnic basket – seems less real to her than the ghostly spectres she is on her way to defeat. She notices him, of course, and later – when it is all over – she will probably wonder what he was doing in the woods. But for now, he barely registers in her emotion-wracked mind.

  The ground rises slightly for a while, then gently falls away, creating a little dip, and when she is just on the edge of the dip, she sees the girl.

  There can be no doubt that she’s dead – none at all.

  Monika reaches into her handbag, wondering if she has coverage on her police radio.

  And that is the last thing she remembers.

  TEN

  A seasoned, battle-scarred doctor would barely have given Meadows’s warrant card a glance, but this one was young and still idealistic enough to want to do everything by the book.

  ‘So how can I help you, detective sergeant?’ he asked, when he’d examined the warrant card from all possible angles.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me about Mrs Brown,’ Meadows said.

  ‘But why would you want to know about her?’ the doctor asked, suspiciously. ‘Attempted suicide is not a criminal offence in this country – it hasn’t been for a number of years.’

  ‘We think this particular suicide attempt may be tied in with a murder we’re investigating.’

  ‘Ah!’ the doctor said.

  ‘So what can you tell me?’

  ‘The poison she took was certainly enough to kill her, and if she’d taken it a few hours earlier, she’d undoubtedly have been dead by the time the home help – Hallelujah Winifred – arrived.’ The doctor paused. ‘Have you had dealings with Mrs Brown before?’

  ‘We’ve met,’ Meadows said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘From the state her joints are in, I would say that even going from the bedroom to the toilet would be a huge and painful effort for her. On the other hand, I’ve read reports of cases in which women in a similar condition have somehow been able to walk for miles and miles. You don’t think she’s one of those cases, do you, detective sergeant?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ Meadows said. ‘I couldn’t say for certain, but I’d be surprised if she’d left the house in years.’

  ‘If that’s the case, then she was definitely assisted in her suicide attempt, because whoever collected all the ingredients for the poison must have been reasonably fit.’

  ‘Collected all the ingredients? Are you telling me the poison was home-made?’

  ‘According to our toxicology department, there’s no doubt about it. It has a belladonna base, but there are a couple of other ingredients which were obviously collected wild.’

  ‘Do you think I could see her?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘If she agrees to see you, I’ve no objection,’ the doctor said, ‘but you’ll probably get no more out of her than I did.’

  Jed Slater was halfway through his pint of brown split when he saw DS Higgins enter the snug bar of the Old Brown Cow, and the plan of action which came immediately into his head was that he should pretend he’d never noticed the sergeant, and just hope that he’d go away.

  The weakness of his strategy was revealed to him when Higgins walked right over to where he was sitting, and said, ‘I want a word, Jed.’

  Slater looked around him, as if he imagined that there was some other Jed sitting there, and when he found none, he said, ‘You want a word with me, Mr Higgins?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Higgins confirmed.

  ‘Should I be asking for my lawyer?’ Slater wondered.

  Higgins grinned. ‘Course not. We’re on different sides of the fence, but we’re still old mates, aren’t we?’

  ‘Mates’ was the very last word Slater would have used to describe their relationship, but he felt it wisest to answer with a cautious, ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So what’s all this talk of lawyers, then? To tell you the truth, you’ve rather hurt my feelings.’

  ‘What’s on your mind, Mr Higgins?’ Jed Slater asked, giving in to the inevitable.

  DS Higgins looked around him. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Jed, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of having our little chat here, where there’s all these criminals who might listen in. I think that we should go somewhere a little more private.’

  ‘Like where?’

  ‘Like the backyard.’

  ‘I’d rather not do that, Mr Higgins.’

  The sergeant frowned. ‘Well, of course, if you’d prefer to put it on a formal footing, we could always go down to the station.�
��

  Jed Slater sighed heavily. ‘All right, Mr Higgins,’ he agreed, ‘the backyard it is.’

  With considerable misgivings, Slater followed Higgins into the enclosed backyard.

  Midway between the toilets and the towers of empty beer crates, Higgins came to a halt and turned to face Slater.

  ‘It’s like this, Jed,’ he said, ‘I’ve really not got time for any pissing about on this particular case, so what I need are straight answers to straight questions. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Higgins,’ Slater agreed, worriedly.

  ‘Back in the good old days, when I was on the beat, you were a cat burglar – and a good one, if I may say so, a regular drainpipe artist.’ Higgins paused. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr Higgins.’

  ‘Did you decide it was a young man’s game, and it would be best to move on? Is that why you became a motorbike thief?’

  ‘I’m not a—’ Slater began.

  Then, as Higgins sank his fist into Slater’s stomach, Slater gasped with pain and sank to his knees.

  ‘You see, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say I can’t afford to be pissed about,’ Higgins said. ‘And what does all that lead to? You’re making me hurt you – and that’s really the last thing I want to do.’

  ‘This is police brutality,’ Slater groaned.

  ‘No, you’ve got that wrong, Jed,’ Higgins told him, lashing out with his left foot. ‘This is police brutality.’

  Higgins kicked him again, then reached down and pulled him into an upright position.

  ‘And this is police brutality,’ he said, lifting Slater off his feet and flinging him across the yard.

  Slater’s body slammed hard into the towers of beer crates, and several of the crates toppled over, landing on his body in the two or three seconds after he hit the ground.

  The noise of crashing crates and breaking glass brought several of the customers rushing to the back door.

  ‘Get back inside!’ said Higgins in a voice which left no room for discussion. ‘Do it now!’

  The men retreated into the pub, and Higgins strolled over to where Slater was lying.